Upgrading the JRE used by ColdFusion

Question

I have a ColdFusion 8.1 application. It gets heavy use and I see jrun.exe getting very high memory usage in the task manager. This is a 32-bit windows 2003 server. When Jrun gets around a gig of memory usage ColdFusion will stop responding at some point. The logs are a little vague, but I start to see garbage collection and heap errors in the ColdFusion log. I assume that the JRE is running out of memory.

I have the max JVM heap set to 1.2gig. After some experimenting, this seemed to be the biggest amount I could allocate and still have ColdFusion start ok. I realize that going to 64-bit might solve the problem, but that is not an option at this time.

I am considering upgrading the JRE (it is at v6.x dated pre-2008, though I don't know the exact version. I am using the JRE that came with ColdFusion 8.1. Has anyone gone through this? I assume it's just a matter of installing the new JRE and pointing ColdFusion to the new JRE directory in the ColdFusion server settings.

tia don

Answer 1

it's EXTREMELY easy to do.

1) download the Java SE Development Kit and install it like normal.

2) open up the jmv.config for cf in a text editor, located in c:\coldfusion8\runtime\bin

3) comment out the existing java.home line with a by putting a "#" at the beginning of the line add a new java.home line below it pointing to your jvm installation.

As an example, my java.home and jvm.config look like this: java.home=C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_11/jre

4) restart the CF services.

As a bonus, you can running JavaRa and free up some space by deleting all the old versions of the JRE.